Colin Powell and Transparency
I already did a rawblog of Gen. Powell's remarks at SLA2009. But it's taken me a bit to finally transcribe the following. The Q&A portion after Powell's speech was very short - only 3 questions. However, I got the chance to ask him the 1st question. Basically, I wanted to know what he thought about providing access to government data. And that's basically what I asked him, without providing specific details (I thought that would be too confrontational). He didn't quite understand what I was asked, so I repeated it. His answer, to paraphase:
You can't stop information flow eventually. He believes in maximum openness, maximum transparency, with reasonable limits for security, privacy, etc. But greater openness and transparency is good for society in the long run.In government, there is a big problem with information hoarding, getting the information to where it needs to be ... there needs to be more information sharing among agencies. His own example of government wanting to keep too tight a rein on information: the military wanted to hobble GPS for civilian use - luckily, that didn't happen and GPS is all over the place (I think he said he had 3 in his car ... a Corvette ... ah, boys and their toys).
Information professionals need to push the envelope as much as we can to get information and data released and accessible to the public. Risk is inherent - pushing means getting pushed back. We need to work out how much risk each of us can manage. But the bias should always be towards sharing, towards transparency.